NASA's $6 million antenna chamber is gone. Engineers say it could sink the next space mission.

Roman launched on a $4 billion, 15-year bet. At Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's flagship spacecraft-engineering campus in Maryland, the engineers and scientists who built the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are still being moved out of their own labs.

The Roman telescope lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in late August 2026, bound for a survey of how the universe expands and how often planets hide around other stars. NASA says the mission will collect more information on those questions than any prior mission has. The success is fresh. So is the next question: what does Goddard have left to build after Roman?

NPR spoke with seven current and former Goddard scientists and engineers for a story published Tuesday. Current employees asked to stay anonymous, citing fear of retaliation. Their account of the last ten months is consistent.

Management forced scientists and engineers out of their workspaces multiple times since November 2025, including as recently as a month before Roman's launch. More than 80 Goddard facilities were pulled into a previously published master plan. Internal NASA documents reviewed by NPR say the relocations were meant to reduce costs, eliminate "waste and redundancies," and avoid tens of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance.

The engineers describe a different trade.

At Goddard's radio communication lab, staff were asked to test a Roman antenna in the run-up to launch and discovered that almost none of their old equipment was still in place. One engineer pointed NPR to a missing $6 million antenna chamber. A propulsion team had to run Roman's fuel tests on less sensitive gear because higher-precision tools had been left behind in an earlier move. Workers and former staff told NPR the relocations have already cost Goddard specialized workspaces, employees, and expensive machines that Roman and other spacecraft depend on.

NASA's defense, on the record, is the cost-and-cleanup line from its own master plan. The engineers' defense is that you do not move a $4 billion telescope's test bench out from under it and expect the next bench to be ready when the next flagship needs it.

What neither side has put on the public record yet is what, specifically, has to be kept, restored, or rebuilt at Goddard before the next flagship mission is greenlit. That is the open question the reporting has put on the table: not whether Roman will work, but whether the ground that supported Roman will still be there for the mission that follows it.